December 1920: the first elected ministry of Madras, and the limits of dyarchy
The Justice Party won 63 of 98 seats in the first elections under the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms. Its ministers soon discovered how little power "transferred subjects" really carried.
The Government of India Act 1919 introduced "dyarchy" in the provinces: some subjects, such as local self-government, public health, education and agriculture, were transferred to Indian ministers answerable to an elected council, while finance, police, irrigation and revenue stayed "reserved" with the Governor's executive council.
The 1920 election
Explainer
The Indian National Congress boycotted the November 1920 elections as part of the non-cooperation campaign. The Justice Party won 63 of the 98 seats. On 17 December 1920, A. Subbarayalu Reddiar, a lawyer and former district board president from South Arcot who had left the Congress in 1916 to join the Justice movement, became the first First Minister of the Madras Presidency.
His tenure was brief. Ill health forced him to resign in July 1921, and P. Ramarayaningar, the Raja of Panagal, Minister of Local Self-Government and Public Health, replaced him. Over the next seventeen years the party formed four of the five ministries under dyarchy and held power for thirteen of them.
"A Minister of Agriculture minus Irrigation"
The party soon found that office and power were not the same thing. In 1924, Kurma Venkata Reddi Naidu, who had been a minister in the first Justice government, described the problem to the Muddiman Committee, which was reviewing the working of dyarchy.
K. V. Reddi Naidu, deposition to the Muddiman Committee, 1924 (as quoted in Wikipedia)I was a Minister of Development without the forests. I was a Minister of Agriculture minus Irrigation. As a Minister of Agriculture I had nothing to do with the Madras Agriculturists Loan Act or the Madras Land Improvement Loans Act... The efficacy and efficiency of a Minister of Agriculture without having anything to do with irrigation, agricultural loans, land improvement loans and famine relief, may better be imagined than described. Then again, I was Minister of Industries without factories, boilers, electricity and water power, mines or labor, all of which are reserved subjects.
What it meant
Even within those limits, the first Justice governments passed measures that outlived them: the first communal Government Order on public appointments in 1921, the removal of the bar on women voters, the Madras Elementary Education Act of 1920, the State Aid to Industries Act of 1922 and the Hindu Religious Endowments Act, introduced in 1922. The party also split: in late 1923 C. R. Reddy left to form a splinter group, and the government survived a no-confidence motion by 65 votes to 44 on the first day of the new council.
The lesson of 1920 still holds for every State government in India: the authority to act matters as much as the mandate to govern.